Novell News

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Novell Inc.
is an American software company that develops and sells networking software
The company was originally founded in
1979
as "Novell Data Systems, Inc."
in
Provo,
Utah,
but is today headquartered in
Waltham, Massachusetts.

Novell is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker
NOVL and employed
5,006 people as of
2006.
The company has revenue of US $961 million, and made a net loss of $8.48 million
for the year to April
2007.

Novell's original product was a hardware-based network server, but in
1983,
the company switched to software, releasing the first version of the Novell NetWare
network operating system. At the same time, the company shortened its name from
Novell Data Systems, Inc. to simply Novell Inc.
During the 1980s, Novell NetWare became the leading PC network operating system.

In the first half of the 1990s, Novell positioned itself to compete head-to-head with
Microsoft, acquiring Unix System Laboratories from AT&T
and the associated UNIX operating system, as well as the WordPerfect word processing software,
the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, and the DR-DOS DOS operating system. However, during
1995 to
1996,
many of these assets were sold off to various other companies:
some UNIX assets (the amount is disputed) to the Santa Cruz Operation (who in turn later sold
those to Caldera who subsequently renamed themselves "The SCO Group"),
DR-DOS to Caldera (as mentioned, now called The SCO Group),
and WordPerfect and Quattro Pro to Corel. At the same time that these events were going on,
Novell also found that it was facing severe competition against NetWare from new
Microsoft products.

Since
2003,
Novell has gradually began to enter the Linux
market, with the acquisition of Ximian
(a developer of open source desktop applications)
and
SuSE
(a Linux distributor). Since this time, Novell
has released many new products, as well as,
in 2005,
helping found
(together with
IBM,
Red Hat,
Philips,
and Sony) the Open Invention Network,
an organization that acquires patents
with the aim of using them to protect
Linux and other
open source
software against
patent infringement cases.

Novell has also found itself in the middle of
SCO's allegations
concerning
Linux, and was in fact sued by
SCO in
2004
(Novell has also filed its own counterclaims against
SCO). The dispute originally arose
because
SCO claimed that Novell transferred UNIX
copyrights to Santa Cruz in
1996,
but Novell claimed to have retained the copyrights. Furthermore,
when SCO sued
IBM (including
IBM's Sequent subsiduary), alleging breach of
contract, Novell claimed it had a right to waive the alleged breaches,
whereas SCO claimed that
Novell did not have such rights. Various other matters have also been added
to the case,
such as whether SCO owes Novell licensing fees
that it collected, and whether Novell's
SuSE Linux activities violate agreements
between Novell and SCO.
At the time of writing (Summer 2007)
many of these issues are still to be resolved,
however on
August 10th2007,
presiding Judge, Dale Kimball, did rule on some of the issues:
"the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights", and
that
Novell
"is entitled, at its sole discretion, to direct SCO to waive its claims against IBM and Sequent, and SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent."

The open source
community has generally been supportive of Novell, in their dispute with
SCO, however an agreement that Novell made
with
Microsoft in November
2006
has proved more controversial.
Some critics have felt that the
patent cooperation clauses of this deal went against the spirit of
open source licensing,
and in fact the
Free Software Foundation has tried to design the
GPL version 3
in such a way as to prevent new deals of this type in future.

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